The End of the World Is Bigger than Love

by Davina Bell

  ‘Ponyboy doesn’t have a ponytail in my heaven,’ I had said. ‘I don’t think he had one in the book, either.’

  ‘Since when is heaven yours? We’ll be in the same one, anyway, though I might not see you all that much at first if Ponyboy has anything to do with it, and especially not if he’s gadding about in a toga.’

  ‘Ponyboy is not a Roman,’ I said. ‘He wouldn’t have a toga.’

  ‘Hey—nobody’s forcing him to wear it,’ said Summer, ‘least of all me.’

  When I got to the bottom of the steps, I went to Edward’s bed. There was shock in my veins. Even after everything, I needed his smell. I hadn’t learned yet to hate it. Like a dog, I guess.

  On the pillow I’d stitched for him, he had left a note.

  The boat was real.

  And next to it, small and glowing, cased in glass, an apology. Here is the lie that I warned you about.

  I ate that dog. Forced it down my throat. The meat was stringy.

  It caught in my teeth, like coconut shreds.

  But it wasn’t Summer who made me.

  I did it myself. I did it to myself.

  Summer

  As I finally reached the end of the beach, I felt something swoop inside me—a joy bird, Winter would have said. The wind was only a wisp round here, and as I tucked my lob behind my ears, I realised I didn’t have heavy boots anymore. Boy oh boy, is that a good feeling, like getting down off the stage after you’ve done your compulsory audition for the school musical that you never wanted to be in anyway, and not having to sit there waiting your turn with a sore stomach, knowing that your singing really isn’t good.

  Even in the dim light, I could see that the sand was softer here, like sifted icing sugar, and up ahead, there was a small rise covered in tiny pink flowers shaped like little trumpets. They were resting in a clover so bright that, even in the dim light, it glowed green and, just where the map said it would be, a path led up over the rocks to the headland. Then there seemed to be a big flat field to cross, and beyond that, I guessed, was the base of the mountain. From there, well, it was up, up, up.

  I shucked my pack and lay back on that lush carpet of grass. I thought about the hotel in India that used to be an old fortress, where we’d stayed once at the end of a summer that went on forever; how we’d gone up to the roof to lie on our backs, just like this, and watch the moon rise. Except there wasn’t a moon now, by the looks of things, and I guess it was there somewhere, just below the horizon, forever waiting to appear.

  On the roof of that hotel in India, we felt so close to the sky. The rubies and diamonds of traffic spun below, and the clatter and the horns and the bleats and the smell of spiced sweat and fried-egg rolls cooked on petrol drums—it all floated up. Warmth wrapped round our bare legs, so brown after a hot week in the hotel pool learning to do somersaults underwater. We were ten, had just turned ten, and for our birthday we got a camera with film (Winter’s request) and a giant ‘10’ cake with tiny purple flowers on white icing (my request), and we’d had leftovers of that cake for dinner up there on the roof. Our hands in each other’s hands were sticky with icing, my right in her left.

  ‘If a plane flew into this building,’ I said, ‘right this exact second, and our bodies floated all the way down to the ground like the Falling Man, I would die happy. That was really good cake.’

  We knew all about the Falling Man, that poor, beautiful guy from the Twin Towers who’d jumped out the window rather than be burned alive, and tumbled down through the air, turning over and over, like an autumn leaf. By the pool that week we’d read Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, so we were all obsessed with 9/11, and there are pictures of the Falling Man in the back of the book but they’ve been reversed so that he floats up, up, up as you flick through to the end. And even though Pops read the blurb and sniffed and said, ‘American schmaltz’, we both agreed that we had been Forever Changed by the main character, Oskar Schell, that complicated little inventor whose dad was trying to phone him from the top of a tower as it burned around him. And though it was sad, sad, sad, that book, is there anything better than feeling Forever Changed?

  ‘Remember how Oskar wanted to make that device that flashed above an ambulance when the person inside was dying? GOODBYE! I LOVE YOU! GOODBYE! I LOVE YOU! Of all his inventions, I think that’s the one I liked the most. That, or the—Ow!’

  I yanked my hand away because Winter’s nails were digging into my palm, and below us a truck beeped and a man yelled and when I looked across, Winter was crying.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked. ‘I thought you loved that ambulance sign.’

  ‘I don’t want to die,’ she sobbed. ‘I don’t want any of us to die.’

  ‘Everyone dies some day,’ I said unhelpfully. ‘Besides,’ I added, remembering something my mother had said in an interview about the people who’d died in the Twin Towers that Winter and I had listened to seventy-seven times. ‘The ending isn’t the story. Remember?’

  ‘I don’t want to die,’ Winter said again through strings of snot, ‘but I don’t want to live like this anymore, either.’

  ‘Winter, we’re in a gosh-darn five-star hotel,’ I said, but of course I knew what she meant.

  Remember we were only ten, and it’s easy when you’re ten to imagine that there’s another way—that surely someone can fix it, whatever ‘it’ is. When you’re ten, you think that everyone should have a home and their own bed, their own bedroom, even, with posters on the wall, and some sort of pet, and an after-school snack, and a school, as if all those things are possible for everyone everywhere.

  ‘I want to go out on the street. I want one of those egg rolls we saw from the car. And I want my old name back,’ said Winter. ‘I miss being—’

  ‘HUSH,’ I said urgently.

  Winter

  Time passed, and still the questions dripped off me, froze in the air, hit the ground.

  I bent down and splashed them onto my face, the hard chips of alphabet. They ticked against each other like flint.

  Did Edward ever love me? Even a bit?

  Was it duty? Was it easy?

  Had he planned it, his touch? His fingers through my hair? Had he practised that part? Who was in my soul if it wasn’t him?

  Did he ache like I did now? Would I always? Would he ever?

  ‘I could find him,’ I said to Summer. ‘I could ask him. Maybe he’s taking that notebook to do something good. They said that—remember? That guy from Big Tech with the baseball cap. He said he was sorry. After the driverless cars…He said he would fix it. He truly cried.’

  ‘That guy was just a really good actor. And besides, even if you did find Edward—if you could,’ said Summer, ‘how would you know he was telling the truth?’

  ‘I would know,’ I said. ‘I’d be able to tell.’

  ‘Like you knew he was an undercover agent?’ asked Summer. ‘You will never know, Winter. You just won’t. That’s the risk you run. And FYI, if you want my two cents, he’s one hundred per cent spy, and a good one, too. I didn’t even pick it myself, and that’s saying something.’

  But when I looked hard, it wasn’t Summer after all. It was me reflected in a window. It was me.

  I sat on a pew. Everything was a gap.

  My whole self ached for Edward as I tried to pull apart the lies from the truths. I tried to find the end of the roll of the sticky tape that was our love. Or whatever it was.

  I curled myself around my knees and closed my eyes. All I wanted was my mother.

  Her warm calm. Her cool wise.

  ‘Hey there, chicken,’ she would say.

  I would tell her about Pete.

  The glass-bottomed boat.

  Giving up our secrets.

  I would ask her.

  Just in case she was listening, I said it out loud.

  ‘Mama?’ I asked. ‘Why do people do all the things that they do?’

  I listened for the answer. But the voice wasn’t hers.

  It was a man’s
voice, and loud.

  It said, ‘Speak no more.’

  I turned and there he was.

  ‘Do you know Edward?’ I whispered. ‘Can you take me to him?’

  He raised his arm. He spoke into his wrist. ‘Peter Pan. Peter Pan. Peter Pan.’ From his belt he pulled—

  Summer

  The rocks were red and big and smooth and really pretty easy to climb, given that it was gloomy and dusky, and I got so totally into picking a path up and around them that I was singing to myself by the time I clambered to the top—a really stirring version of ‘Shake It Off ’ because, boy, did Pops have a thing for Taylor Swift when he was younger, before people cottoned on to the fact that she was one of those humans bred in petri dishes for world domination. When I scrambled over the ridge of the headland, I found myself on a cliff, looking out over the sea. And as I turned to look at the field I’d have to cross, every thought was scraped clean from my mind, like scraps from a plate.

  Have you ever burned a pizza—I mean, really burned it—like, left it in the oven till it was black and no part was even the tiniest bit eatable? That was what I was looking at—a huge expanse of scorched topping, stretching out to the base of the mountain, chalky and dark.

  Here and there were the white stumps of trees on the blackened ground, their roots exposed, like pale hands cut off at the wrists. And the ground—it was crunchy with the ends of things. Stone? Bone? I couldn’t tell in the half-light, but it felt like stepping on popcorn. That carpet of death went on for miles, thicker in some places, hotter in others. Above me the sky was all orange clouds, the ones that bloom like cauliflower, backlit in violet—a sky I swear we’d seen in a gallery, Winter and I, in a red-walled room in Paris. Through the middle of that big old plain cut a wide stream, a gash of silver. I ran all the way over to it and plunged my head in. Was that water ever frosty. As I squeezed out my hair, I thought of how this side of the island was eerie like an old convict prison, or an empty house after a removalist has been, or a dry fish bowl: somehow heavy with the absence of everything that’s been before. No wonder Walter hadn’t let us come here all those moons ago. Or was this something more recent?

  I kept trudging, crunching across that weird ground cover and thinking of so many things, none of them good. I thought about the fire in the Amazon to smoke out all the refugees who were hiding there—how it burned for four years before the whole forest disappeared. I thought of the camps in Mexico after the US built the wall across their border. I thought of the mass graves for corpses from The Greying that were dug in a day; the legs sticking out, bent into Ls and Ds and Vs, so geometric.

  ‘What happened here?’ I wanted to ask Winter, or Walter, or Pops. ‘Was this a fire or, like, something more sinister? And why is it only this part of the island? How’s our side so healthy?’ But nobody answered. There was nothing here, not even the kinder parts of my mind.

  I felt as if I had been walking forever when I turned around to clock how far I’d come. But, hoo boy, the trail of footprints was short as a skipping rope and the sea still seemed ridiculously close.

  I needed to rest, but I didn’t want to sit down on that black dust; somehow it seemed so dirty, like the smog from the nuclear power plants before they were all blown up. I took off my pack and dug around for that foil emergency blanket, and I spread it out and pretended I was having a Famous Five–style picnic—that the sweetened condensed milk was a treacle tart, that the water I scooped from the stream as it trickled by was actually ginger pop or lemonade, and on reflection, it probably wasn’t realistic for those five to have had so much time for adventures, given all the trips to the dentist they must have had to make to get their sugar cavities fixed.

  I sat with my back to the mountain, because I wasn’t quite ready to face just how huge it really was up close—topped with snow, like a dozy brontosaurus dusted in icing sugar. How I was going to make it up there without a scrap of polar fleece—without shoes or protein bars or a fancy breathing machine—was anyone’s guess. I sighed and instead I looked back out, down over the cliff, at the sand and beyond that the sea, that big opalescent field glowing faintly in the distance, and I wondered about George from the Famous Five—whether she was just a run-of-the-mill tomboy, or if she was really a boy trapped inside a girl’s body, desperate to crack out, miserable with the unfairness of it all. Good old books, I thought with true thanks in my heart. You’re still with me. Without you I’m never really a—

  And then there she was.

  So far in the distance that anyone else would have thought she was a rogue buoy, the head of a curious sea lion. But I knew. Of course I did.

  It was Winter. And she was running—running into the water, as if she were hunting down the horizon. It was up to her waist and she was still running. She was running and she was alone—completely alone—and my heart grew wings.

  She had left that bear behind and come looking because of our Love (capital L). Winter was trying to find me. I smiled. I was sure of it.

  I like to think that the plane was heading this way anyway—that it wasn’t attracted by the shine of my silver emergency blanket, crinkling in the half-dark like a fallen star. But suddenly it was there, swooping over the mountain and down towards me, sharp like a flying syringe. I felt it in my teeth, the thrum of it, as I threw myself onto the ground facedown. The sweetened milk sloshed in my stomach. It circled and circled, that plane, first nearer then further away in turns, like a mosquito whine on a hot, still night. I could feel the heat of its lights through my eyelids, but they didn’t pass near enough to cut over my body, and I guess that was one thing to be grateful for. All I could think of was Winter, down there in the sea. Had they seen her? Did they want her? Could anyone want her as much as I did?

  Eventually I couldn’t stand it, and I raised my head, keeping my eyes squinted up as much as I could, like Pops had taught us, so they wouldn’t reflect the glare. And, holy smoke, you wouldn’t believe what I saw.

  The plane was spraying something—a sky-blue mist that hung thick in curtains. When the light hit a patch, it glowed rainbows, as if it were made of unicorn’s tears. It would really be a hit at a school disco, whatever it was.

  Then the lights dipped and circled and headed out over the sea, and I stood up so fast, I hit my head on yesterday. I sprinted back down through that crunchy potting mix of death, and I reckon I could even have kept up with that bear, my fists were pumping so hard.

  I had to run right through a cloud of that blue stuff, and you want to know something weird? It felt warm and cold at the same time, like when you put your fingers through the trails of a sparkler. At first I tried to hold my breath in case it was Nazi death gas, like we’d read about in Anne Frank’s diary. But when it swirled around my face, it didn’t feel harsh or stingy or toxic; it was balmy and gentle, like a drying-up puddle after a sun shower.

  PHEW, all caps, because when I got back to the edge of the cliff and the big red rocks, the plane was a fleck on the horizon, and Winter was still out in the waves—a version of her so tiny, I could have threaded her through the eye of a needle. But then, so quickly, she wasn’t. Her head surfaced a couple of times, but soon I could only make out an arm, a hand, a ripple. And then nothing. I practically popped out my eyeballs looking, but she was gone.

  Because Winter couldn’t float.

  Of course she couldn’t, because you need body fat to float, and it’s something to do with buoyancy and I bet Mikie would know, that gentle, gracious blubber king, but he wasn’t here to ask.

  Winter was just skin and bone now. She couldn’t float, and out there, far from my reach, she was drowning.

  Winter

  Speak no more, speak no more.

  As I ran, it matched my footfalls.

  As I ran, I thought, Of course.

  Out to sea, I ran on water.

  Speak no more.

  I thought, Of course.

  Summer

  BOOM! You actually cannot imagine how fast I threw myself back
down that wall of rocks, how I shot into the sea, half-stroking and half-running in the way that you do when the water is waist-deep and flashing around you. Boy oh boy, you cannot fathom how many dead sea creatures I crunched to get out there, and how bad I felt about that, as if I were having a dance party on top of a mass grave.

  By the time the seabed dropped away and I had to swim, I had lost sight of her. Frantic doesn’t even begin to describe all that flailing around, dashing in one direction and then the other, diving under, grasping with my hands, my desperate fingers. The memory of diving head-first into the dress-up trunk, the lid slamming shut above me, the certainty that I would die. Each second that passed rang heavy like a gong, meant something worse and then worse, until it was too much to hold in my head.

  ‘MIKIE,’ I screamed when I came up for breath. ‘HELP ME!’

  But there was no Mikie, no Pops. It was us alone, and as I dived under again, that just didn’t seem fair.

  It dawned on me while I treaded water and paused for breath that this was my fault. If I had stayed at Bartleby like Winter wanted, she wouldn’t be stretched out, drowned, on the ocean floor. She would be lying in the moat, floating on her back, her head nestled into the nook of that bear’s armpit, the water shimmery like silk, her hair fanned out. I came to a realisation then, and you might think that I was getting carried away in the drama of the moment, but I promise you it’s true: I would have lived happily alongside them forever, orbiting their love like a stringless kite, if it meant that Winter was safe for always.

  I sank back down, blowing out every last wisp of air so that I would drop further, and I waved my hands around and around, and pretty soon I was dizzy with the effort of it all, and I wanted to just fall down like you do when you’re a kid spinning in circles with your face to the sky.

  Right about then was when my big toe hit the jelly of her eyeball, my heel struck the bridge of her nose and I felt it give a little. I took a gasp so huge that I gulped in a whole lot of sea water, and I had to shoot back to the surface to get the air to go back down, which was incredibly tedious, as you can imagine. ‘Idiot!’ I said to myself, but secretly I was kind of in awe of my mad search and rescue skillz, because, really, what were the chances I’d actually find her? Usually it was Winter who had the patience to look carefully for things while I was doing Couch Gymnastics.